American Classics

I persist in my efforts to expose the kids to American classics.  Last weekend High School Friend on Right Ocean, a chemical engineer who is also a jazz saxophonist, came to visit along with his wife.  He brought his alto and soprano saxes, and led The Boy and The Girl in a jam session in the family room.  HSFRO played soprano, TB played alto, and TG played piano on “Blues Walk,” by Clifford Brown, and “Sonnymoon for Two,” by Sonny Rollins.  They didn’t have any sheet music, so TB and TG had to figure out the notes.  Which they did.

Jazz may be well past its prime as a cultural form, but I apologize to nobody for exposing the kids to Sonny Rollins.

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For the Fourth, we took the kids to Boston to expose them to Fenway Park and the Freedom Trail, two more American classics.  

Aside from an unremitting and indecently strong heat wave, it went beautifully.  TG picked up a stuffed “Wally,” the Red Sox mascot based loosely on the Green Monster.  I hadn’t realized just how small Fenway actually is.  I grew up going to Rochester Red Wings games in the old Silver Stadium -- the one that eventually closed due to pigeon droppings -- and Fenway didn’t feel that much bigger.  

We saw them play the San Diego Padres.  The Sox won on a pinch-hit home run in the bottom of the ninth.  I couldn’t have asked for a better game.  The Boy’s favorite player, Jon Lester, pitched, and pitched well.  Several players doubled off the Green Monster, which seemed appropriate.  And TG got her ice cream in a batting helmet.

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Despite the heat, we decided to do the guided tour of the Freedom Trail.  I felt bad for our tour guide, who wore a wool overcoat and hat despite Satan’s Sweatsock levels of heat and humidity.  

If you haven’t done the Trail, it’s worth doing.  The tour guides slip in and out of character as appropriate, and the sights are worth seeing.  Paul Revere’s grave!  The site of the Boston Massacre!  The kids were shocked when the tour guide referred to Christmas celebrations as “Catholic superstition,” but that was appropriate to his character.    

Sometimes the clashes of old and new led to unintentional comedy.  At the site of the Boston Massacre, the guide noted that the building across the way was the British customs house, the most reviled building in Boston.  Now, by contrast, it’s...a Bank of America.  Some things just don’t change.

For once, I even got to trot out some of my old political theory training.  The guide mentioned John Locke and his theory of “life, liberty, and..,” and the crowd said “pursuit of happiness!”  I said “property!”  The guide looked surprised that I knew that.  The kids were suitably impressed.  Yes, reader, I quoted Locke to impress the kids.  Because that’s how we roll.

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We wrapped it up with a visit to the MIT campus and science museum.  The Boy was impressed at the posters for the campus Quidditch league, and we made sure to take pictures in all of the places you’d expect.  If you haven’t seen the MIT museum, I recommend it.  The building doesn’t look like much on the outside, but it’s bigger than it looks, and the second story is seriously cool.  It has an impressive hologram collection, a nifty exhibit of machines as art, and an arresting collection of photographs of human settlements in extreme climates.  TB was like a pig in mud.  

Holograms may not be old enough to be American classics, but they’ll get there.  And the sight of a twelve year old boy’s face open in undisguised wonder is a classic in any culture.

A Two-Part Question

You read an article about a college at which the average salary for assistant professors is $51,000, for associate professors is $57,100, and full professors is $67,000.  What do you conclude?

a.  It’s scandalous that they’re so low.  No wonder they’re losing people!

b. That sounds about right.

c. Sheesh, adjuncts would kill for that.

d. Interesting that community colleges often pay that or less, with higher teaching loads, and nobody says “boo.”

Justify your answer.

Hybrids and the Log Flume

We live pretty close to Six Flags New England, so every year for the past several we’ve bought season passes and made a point of going several times over the summer.  It has both a “dry” park -- mostly roller coasters -- and a water park; we spend most of our time in the water park, trying not to think too much about the hygiene of it all.

My favorite ride at theme parks, whether here or elsewhere, is always the log flume.  It’s a cross between a roller coaster and a water slide.  Basically, you climb into a log-shaped car that rides a track up a steep hill, slowly, until it falls quickly into a pool of water.  You combine the sudden steep drop of a roller coaster with a satisfying soaking.  It’s a hybrid.  

The log flume has been a tough sell for the kids.  (A few years ago I went on one with TW.  The torrent of profanity -- some if it pretty creative and specific -- that poured out of her while climbing the hill convinced me not to try again.)  But this year The Girl decided that it was worth a shot.  Armed with Scandinavian-strength “liquid lead” sunscreen, we hit the park, ready to get soaked.

And it was gone.  It was replaced by the twelfth or thirteenth (I’ve lost count) roller coaster.

A sympathetic park employee explained that the log flume had been sacrificed because it wasn’t really all that popular anymore.  Now that the water park has expanded, the dry park didn’t need a log flume anymore.  It was neither fish nor fowl.  It was a hybrid.  It was sacrificed to make room for yet another variation on what a colleague calls a “spin and barf” ride.

TG and I were irked.  The hybrid nature of the log flume is the secret of its greatness; you get the thrill of a coaster, and the splash of a water slide.  It’s the best of both!  But too few people saw it for what it was, so it went to the big park in the sky.

I’m wondering if this explains something about hybrid courses, too.  

Hybrid courses combine some amount of classroom time -- less than standard, maybe an hour a week -- with a significant online presence.  Done well, hybrid courses offer the best of both worlds.  They offer some of the convenience of online classes and some of the human interaction of onsite classes.  When they’re structured well, they allow professors to put activities where they make the most sense.  For example, expository lecture could move online, leaving valuable class time for project-based work with actual human support.  

The studies I’ve seen on learning outcomes suggest that the best outcomes occur in hybrid courses, precisely because they allow for a variety of approaches.  By creating a sort of scarcity of class time, they force that time to be more focused.  And by allowing students the flexibility of online learning, they offer real benefits to people with different schedules, work demands, and approaches to learning.  

Hybrids make a world of sense from an institutional perspective, too.  If a class that normally meets twice a week only meets once a week, with the rest moved online, then you’ve just doubled your physical capacity without building anything.  You gain efficiencies in classroom use, parking, and wear and tear on your physical plant, but you don’t lose touch with students.

But students rarely sign up for hybrids.  As with the log flume, hybrids tend to fall between the cracks.  Students who want the convenience of online don’t want to have to show up once a week at a given time and place.  And students who fear the computer fear the computer.  I’ve heard students say that hybrids seem like more work than any other format, so given an option, they stay away.  The only ones with which we’ve had much success have been in cohort programs in which students haven’t had an option to take anything else.

I like the idea that we could combine better learning outcomes with greater efficiency, but for whatever reason, the hybrid class seems to be the educational equivalent of the log flume.  Undeniably awesome, but without an obvious customer base.

Has anyone out there found a way to get students who have a choice to try hybrids?  I’m convinced that if The Girl had a chance to try the log flume, she would have liked it as much as I did.  It’s just a matter of that first try.  I’d hate to see a format that makes so much sense sacrificed because it’s not obviously either fish or fowl.

No, Don’t Pay It Forward

Apparently, Oregon is considering a plan to allow students at public colleges and universities to skip tuition and fees upfront, in return for agreeing to be taxed a set percentage of their income for the first twenty years after they leave college.  It’s known as “Pay It Forward.”

It’s an audacious, innovative, terrible idea.  I love the spirit, but it’s a train wreck waiting to happen.

A similar idea came up in California last year.  At the time, I raised several objections.  (You can read the full version here.)  The highlights:

- Obviously, in the interim between now and payback time, the state would have to pony up far more money than it currently does.  Unless I misread the politics of it, that isn’t likely.

- The political impulse, over time, would be to phase out the state subsidy altogether, and to shift the entire cost burden to students.  (Admittedly, this objection is vulnerable to “as opposed to...?”)

- Higher education would be subjected even more strongly than it already is to the vagaries of economic cycles.  Since recessions hit the young hardest, and this tax would mostly hit people from their early twenties to their early forties, the hit to college budgets in recessions would be magnified.

- Students are stubbornly heterogeneous.  (The positive term for that is “diverse.”)  How would this work for part-time students?   What about students who go back to college at age thirty?  What about students who go on to graduate school and don’t make meaningful money for eight or ten years out?  Transfer students?  Students who repeat courses?

- Scholarships could become irrelevant.  Why a state would want to replace privately donated money with its own is beyond me, but there it is.

- If you think financial aid is administratively complex now, just imagine verifying the income of graduates ten years out who have every incentive to lie.  In the absence of some sort of unit record system, good luck with that.

Since then, I’ve come up with a few more, with help from wise and worldly readers.

- High-earning students would resent what they perceived as overpayment.  (I’m told that this was the experience in Australia, which actually tried something like this.) Since high earning tends to correspond to high influence, I’d expect to see disgruntled high earners use their clout to minimize their obligations.  To the extent that they succeed, they hollow out the cross-subsidy that would have paid for all those grad students and stay-at-home parents.

- Like socialism in one country, a plan like this in one state is doomed.  Students who expect not to make much -- say, the ones who expect to go on to grad school -- would flock to Oregon.  Students who expect to make a lot of money -- the petroleum engineering and computer science majors -- would flee Oregon for more hospitable climes.  That kind of adverse selection would wreak havoc on the cross-subsidy model.

- From an institutional perspective -- come on, you knew that was coming -- separating budgets from performance by five to ten years can’t help but create weird incentives.  Community colleges would get a particularly raw deal, since its high-achieving students tend to transfer, and therefore to make relatively little for the first couple of years out.  (The typical college junior isn’t exactly rolling in it.)  The plan seems to be structured on the assumption that students are either community college grads or four year grads; it isn’t obvious how it would handle students who are both.  When you have a student body with lots of thirty-five year olds, part-time students, and students with developmental and similar needs, the model won’t fit.

- I really don’t think the state has thought through what it would mean to lose Federal financial aid.  Right now, much of what we call “tuition” actually comes indirectly from Federal coffers, whether as Pell grants, work-study awards, or subsidized loans.  That’s money that the state doesn’t have to provide.  There’s a case to be made that as states have cut back their support, they have effectively shifted the burden of paying for higher ed from states to the Feds.  Financial aid is the new state aid.  To the extent that Oregon displaces Federal aid with its own money, it gives its own taxpayers a uniquely raw deal.  Residents of Oregon would still pay Federal taxes, but they’d lose this particular Federal benefit.  As a non-Oregonian, that’s not my problem, but I can see Oregon’s voters getting cranky once they figure it out.

I understand the first-blush appeal of the idea.  But we could get nearly all of the benefit of this system at far lower cost simply by making income-based repayment the default mode for student loans.  There would still be room for scholarships, institutional incentives would be closer to real time, the state wouldn’t lose Federal support, and we wouldn’t have to worry so much about students who transfer (or, for that matter, about students who strike it rich).  If Oregon wants to reduce sticker shock -- a worthy goal -- it should simply increase its subsidies to public higher ed.  It can work; in my own state, for example, we’ve agreed to freeze tuition and fees for next year in exchange for higher state support.  Get it in writing, and it’s not that hard.

Wise and worldly readers, what do you think?  Am I being unjustly harsh, or is this actually the slow-motion disaster it appears to be?

CCSF

I know it’s foolishness to make predictions in writing.  That said, there’s no getting around the fact that it’s politically impossible that City College of San Francisco will actually, for real, close in a year.  It’s not going to happen.

I say this with no special or privileged insight into the inner workings of CCSF.  I know it has over 80,000 students.  That’s enough.

From the vantage point of someone outside California, but with experience in community college administration, I’m guessing that there’s plenty of truth on several sides of the current disputes around CCSF.  Faculty advocates are arguing that the accrediting body never said that the teaching at CCSF was below par.  That’s true, but misleading. The reason they never said it is that there’s no meaningful outcomes assessment, or even internal supervision, to enable anyone to say one way or the other.  My guess is that the teaching there ranges from great to not-so-great, just like at any large institution.  The fact that I have to guess is, itself, the problem.

The accreditors counter-argue that many faculty feel intimidated by their “advocates,” and don’t feel free to disagree in public.  This is almost certainly true.  Anyone who remembers the rally-around-the-flag atmosphere in late 2001 will remember how difficult it was to dissent in any meaningful way.  Siege mentalities don’t lend themselves to open-ended inquiry.  It’s hard to be nuanced with a megaphone.  That said, tendentious advocates aren’t new under the sun.  The critique passes the sniff test, but isn’t nearly enough to be dispositive.

The accreditors also argue that the college faces serious flaws in its internal financial controls.  I find the claim plausible, only because it would be easy to disprove.  (A charge of having only three days’ worth of operating funds in reserve would be easy to refute, if it were false.) Given the stakes, and the length of warning, I have to assume that if there something exculpatory, CCSF would have shown it by now.  Yes, I’d want stronger proof than that to convict, but from the outside it seems plausible.  Obviously, if the charge is true, it’s potentially quite serious.  These are public dollars and student loans we’re talking about.  My impression is that the issue is more confusion than corruption, but in a way, that’s worse.  Corruption can be fixed by hauling off a few bad guys.  Confusion may require rebuilding the plane in mid-flight.

The AFT is claiming that CCSF is being held to a higher standard than, say, the University of Phoenix.  I’d file that under “true, but misleading.”  It’s true to the extent that the accrediting body for CCSF is not the same as the accrediting body for Phoenix: the former is the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges, a subset of WASC, but the latter is the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association.  (I’ve never understood how Arizona fits under “North Central,” but never mind that.)  But the standards aren’t all that different.  Randi Weingarten may have an ideological objection to the existence of for-profit higher education -- many people do -- but that’s a different issue.  Phoenix got slapped by its accrediting body last year too, so the claim that it’s getting some sort of pass is hard to sustain.  

Making matters cloudier, there’s no shortage of conflicts of interest on all sides.  The faculty and staff of CCSF are fighting to keep their jobs, and can be expected to seize on anything that might look useful.  (I’m reminded of the old adage that it’s difficult to get a man to understand an argument when his paycheck depends on him not understanding it.)  Current students obviously want their credits to count, as do their families.  Loyal alumni in the area would also look askance at a perceived devaluation of their degrees.

On the other side, regional accreditors have something to prove, too.  They have been put on the defensive over the last few years.  Increasingly skeptical politicians are wondering how higher ed as a sector can continue to claim that nearly everybody is doing a good job when costs keep going up and job placement continues to lag.  It would be easy to make a case that the accreditor is rattling its saber to ensure its own continued existence.  By getting tough on a conspicuous target, it’s able to claim with a straight face that it’s serious about upholding standards.  CCSF received warnings in several areas multiple times over the last decade, so it’s hard to say that the accreditors were unprovoked.  But while CCSF may have supplied means and opportunity, I could see an argument that the accreditors came with motive.

Still, I’d be shocked if CCSF didn’t win some sort of reprieve on appeal.  80,000-plus students, plus thousands of employees, plus loyal alumni, add up to a potentially potent political force.  The accrediting body has made its point.  The fact that someone in Massachusetts even knows what’s going on at CCSF shows that it has made its point.  It has made a splash, and it will get its pound of flesh in one form or another.  (I’d expect some sort of short-term probationary period with mandates in financial controls and outcomes assessment.)  But the political gain from looking tough would become a political nightmare if they actually closed the place.  Governor Brown may be quirky, but he’s not suicidal.  

So my fearless prediction: CCSF will win a conditional reprieve on appeal.  

You heard it here first.

Fast, Furious, and Fenway

The MOOA meme (“massively open online administration”) has been making its way around the interwebs for a few days now.  It’s a hamfisted satire, basically saying that since college administrators all make the same decisions anyway, why not just replace them all with one?  

It’s a cute idea if you think that administration is mostly about making policy.  If you understand that it’s mostly about implementation in a complex and always changing environment, though, it’s just silly.  

Over the last week or so, the changes have been coming fast and furious.  It has been quite a week for external events.

Most notably for higher ed, the interest rate on new, subsidized student loans just doubled, from 3.4 to 6.8 percent.  That means that subsidized student loans are now more expensive than mortgages.  It also means that students starting in September -- not just freshman, actually -- will face notably higher borrowing costs than they did last month.  They may not feel it for a while, of course, but it’ll catch up eventually.

Student loans are a particularly nasty form of personal debt, since they come without collateral.  It’s impossible to short-sell a degree, so lenders have had the law changed several times to make payback essentially inescapable.  

How this will affect community colleges is hard to say.  Most of our students don’t borrow, since they’re either on full Pell or capable of just paying. (Many of the ones who “just pay” work an alarming number of hours per week outside of class to do it.  Some might be better off borrowing.)  Given the short time horizon that many students use when enrolling, the idea of higher payments years later may or may not pack the punch that it “should.”  Perversely, the change could actually benefit community colleges to the extent that they price more students out of more expensive places.  If more middle-class students use our lower tuition to manage their overall educational debt -- leaving more borrowing room for years three and four and maybe later -- we may be okay.  But if I were at a small, tuition-driven, expensive, non-elite private college, I’d be sweating bullets.

At the same time, the Supreme Court has made life easier for gay couples in the dozen or so states (hi!) that recognize same-sex marriage.  Put differently, it just made recruiting gay professionals easier in a dozen or so states, and harder in the other 37 or 38.  From a hiring perspective, this is great news for New England.  For North Carolina, not so much.  Of course, North Carolina is free to step up at any time.  In the meantime, I’ll happily hire the best of the best, and welcome them to a state that understands the concept of equal protection of the laws.  All-star candidates in, say, Tennessee may decide that Northampton is worth the winters.

It is.

Then I got word that Massachusetts has passed a budget that partially reverses the trend of state disinvestment in public higher education, making it possible for the state’s community colleges (hi!) to freeze tuition and fees for next year.  Yes, the interest rate for loans may be going up, but at least the principal isn’t.  Whether this is a welcome blip or the start of a very welcome trend remains to be seen, but after the last few years, I’ll happily take it.  Add frozen tuition and fees to the increased use of Open Educational Resources, and some students may actually see a drop in the total cost of attendance next year.  After years -- okay, decades -- of severe intergenerational injustice, it’s refreshing to see the young catch a break.  Here’s hoping it sets a new trend.

Finally, as a delayed Father’s Day gift, TW is taking the kids and me to Fenway on Wednesday to catch our first Red Sox game.  We may have to protect some tender young ears from some of the, uh, distinctive language for which Fenway is known, but it’ll be worth it.  (We deliberately avoided a Yankees game for that very reason.)  TB is beside himself with excitement.  TG is mostly looking forward to getting ice cream in a little batting helmet.  It’s all good.

Happy Fourth.  The blog will be back on Monday, July 8.

Of Temps and Trainees

First jobs have changed.  

I’m not referring to summer jobs for teenagers, which are largely what they’ve always been.  I’m referring here to first “real” jobs -- full-time, salaried, open-ended positions that might lead somewhere.

Back in the late 90’s, during the Clinton boom, I used to hear variations on “you educate them., and we’ll train them.”  That was even true working at DeVry, which prided itself on producing “instant on” workers.  When the economy was humming along and labor shortages in certain fields were the order of the day, it wasn’t weird for companies to look for generally smart people and train them in the specifics of what they did.  Given the speed with which the tech sector evolved, that method made sense; by the time you finished a four year degree, much of what you had learned in the first two years was already obsolete anyway.  Beyond some basics, employers wanted to know that you were trainable, and that you had enough workplace sense that they could surround you with adults and not worry about it.

My brother played the situation similarly.  He was a history and religion double major, but he found himself a company that was willing to train smart people to work as technical writers.  He has been able to fashion a successful career from there.  Once the first foot was in the door, he was fine.

In the recent discussion of colleges and workforces, though, I’ve seen a shift.  Employers in general are less willing to train -- they’re much more vocal about wanting the “instant on” employee.  The speed of technical change hasn’t slowed -- if anything, it has accelerated -- but the old “you educate them, we’ll train them” model isn’t as popular as it was.

Part of that, I suspect, is the switch from a labor shortage to a labor surplus.  Those of us in academia know this shift well, since we experienced it first.  When employers are desperate for people, they’ll overlook a few gaps in preparation and fill them in later.  But when you have your choice of great people, it’s easy to sacrifice training budgets and just hire people who have already done the job elsewhere.  Why put up with rookie mistakes when there are experienced people eager to step in?

In a sense, the temp is the new trainee.  That’s where the experience comes from now.  In academia, that means adjuncting; in the corporate world, it means internships or project-based assignments or contract work or straight-up “temping.”  Given plenty of candidates for full-time positions, it’s rational for an employer to prefer candidates with some demonstrated experience over candidates with none.  But candidates are expected to get that experience through an incredibly low-paid sort of pickup work that was never designed to be educative.  

The old apprenticeship or trainee model wasn’t terribly well-paid either, but it was specifically designed to both produce better workers and weed out the hopeless.  And when times were better, it actually led somewhere.  

The graduate student unionization movement that took hold in the 90’s was an early response to the realization that a generation of grad students was getting the worst of both worlds.  Grad school was still designed on the old apprenticeship model -- that’s how they justified the poverty and peonage -- but upon graduation, those same students had to serve time in the new temp-based form of training.  And even after all that, which could easily add up to a decade or more, there was no guarantee of a real job at the end.  The unionization drive was based on a recognition that it’s one thing to defer gratification and another to forego it altogether; if grad student peonage is merely low-paid work, rather than sufficient training, then the workers should be allowed to protect their rights.  Which, in fact, they should.  It didn’t solve the larger problem, but it was better than nothing.

Now that a variation on the academic model has made its way throughout the economy, colleges are getting blamed for not preparing students for jobs.  Yes, there’s always room for improvement, but at a basic level this is a misunderstanding.  The jobs have changed.  All of us -- higher ed, the broader public, political leadership -- are still coming to terms with that.  Community colleges are part of a solution, but the issue is far, far larger.

Friday Fragments

If you haven’t yet read The Unwinding, by George Packer, I really can’t recommend it enough.  It’s an account of the dissolution of the American middle class over the last forty or so years, told almost entirely through biographies.  (It’s pretty clearly modeled on John Dos Passos’ USA trilogy.)  

Packer is a thoughtful and subtle writer who has enough craft to let the various biographies circle his thesis, rather than just using them as illustrations.  Yes, you can figure out his politics, but he rarely violates the three-dimensionality of his characters in the service of a point.  The sympathetic people make mistakes, and the unsympathetic ones have real strengths.  It’s not a quick read, but it’s an elegant and provocative one.

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I hope my colleagues on campus don’t take this personally, but the occasional day when most other people are on vacation can be remarkably productive.  The major downside is that scheduling meetings requires a sort of hopscotch.

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A tip o’the cap to state senator Wendy Davis of Texas.  Anyone who can get me to watch a livestream of the Texas legislature at ten o’clock at night has to be on to something.  I know the law she blocked will probably be enacted anyway, and sooner rather than later, but Senator Davis did something remarkable.  She broke the monopoly on political discussion -- ironic, for a filibuster -- and made obvious to all just how far the ruling party would go to get what it wants.  (Literally turning back the clock?  Wow.)  She gave liberals a much needed heroine, and reminded many of us that the phrase “Democrat from Texas” isn’t an oxymoron.  Well done.

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Along similar lines, I was heartened to see the Supreme Court strike down the Defense of Marriage Act.  As with the Texas senate, the value in it goes beyond the immediate issue of equal recognition of same-sex marriage, as important as that is.  It also made clear that Justice Scalia has crossed over from an intimidating extremist to a vaguely embarrassing joke.  “Argle bargle” sounds like something that Schnitzel would say on Chowder, but Schnitzel is a cartoon character.  Scalia is starting to become cartoonish, too.  He’s like a Scooby Doo villain -- “I would have gotten away with it, too, if not for those meddling gays.”  He’s not even a worthy opponent anymore; his tenure has gone from tragedy to farce.   A man once feared is now either pitied or, more commonly, laughed at.

The world changes, whether you give it permission or not.  Justice Scalia rages against it for its presumption.  My money is on the world.

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Over the past week, I’ve been in several meetings in which decisions were put in parentheses, not to be fully resolved until we know whether the House or Senate version of the state budget would pass.  That kind of suspended animation is a deadweight cost, no matter which budget wins.  Here’s hoping for a resolution as quick as it is thoughtful...

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The kids finished school this week, The Boy completing sixth grade and The Girl completing third.  They brought home some of their work from the year.  The Girl -- all of 8 years old -- wrote a story that made me laugh out loud.  With her permission, here’s the opening:

A long time ago in a land not too far away, there once lived a handsome prince.  Now, you might immediately think that this story is going to go like any other fairy-tale.  The prince and the princess fall in love and the prince saves her for whatever reason.  But this story isn’t like that.  Not at all.  Positively not at all.  Absolutely, positively not at all.  Definitely, absolutely, positively, not at all.  I’ll stop now.  But I hope you got my point.

‘Cause anyway, princesses should be able to save themselves.  They don’t need a prince to do everything for them.  But that’s sadly something they’re yet to learn.  So anyway, here’s the story.  (I don’t know if there’s a moral or not, but keep your eyes open for one.)

Once upon about 11:00 yesterday...

Write on, TG.  

A Warning to My Colleagues

I wasn’t surprised by a new study showing concrete benefits for low-income students who attend Early College High School programs.  The study used a random lottery to assign certain students to Early College programs, while keeping other, otherwise-similar students out.  Attendance in the programs is positively correlated with subsequent college enrollment and graduation.

Programs like that can do wonders for kids in difficult circumstances.  They can demystify college, making it seem real.  They can take kids out of high school settings that just don’t work for them, whether because of bullying, homophobia, or whatever other dysfunction the local high schools happen to suffer.

From experience and observation, though, I have to offer a warning to any of my colleagues who are considering establishing one.

Some of your faculty will hate it.

I say “some,” not “all,” because the sentiment isn’t universally shared.  But among those who will oppose it, statistics about success won’t matter.  Neither will appeals to social justice, testimonials from students, or solicitations of alternatives.  

They’ll take a program like that as a threat to their status as college professors.  They’ll see it as encroachment by high schools onto college territory, and feel it as an implied insult.  It will strike at the heart of a status anxiety that ultimately won’t be soothed with statistics.  You’ll know that this is the issue when you start hearing arguments about “identity.”  

It’s easy for faculty to feel embattled.  (My friend Lesboprof had a nice piece on that last month.)  Higher ed is acutely status-conscious from the outset, and community colleges don’t carry the prestige of universities or elite colleges.  Over the last several years, cc’s in most of the country have endured some pretty rough budget years, even by the standards of a sector that’s underfunded in the best of times.  Faculty have seen the move towards adjuncts, and many of them see it, with some warrant, as a devaluation of their role.  And recently, calls for higher graduation rates and more workforce development strike many liberal arts faculty as offensive; they read the former as a veiled order to lower their standards, and the latter as foreshadowing downsizing.  Taken in combination, that’s a powerful set of stressors.

When you start with a hair trigger, and then hear something about high school students coming on campus, it’s easy to read an ECHS program as an intolerable insult.  It’s a misreading, and a dangerous one, but I can see where it comes from.

In a perfect world, we could address the various stressors directly and thereby lower everybody’s blood pressure.  At that point, it would be easier to discuss the merits of a given program.  But the anxieties run deep.  Local administrations don’t have the power to undo years of state austerity.  The higher ed prestige hierarchy predates all of us, and has psychic effects far beyond anything a given dean or vp could address.  And while I absolutely agree that local administrations should be clear on rejecting grade inflation as a retention strategy, it’s simply impossible to ignore the larger social pressures to ensure the employability of graduates.  When a legislature announces point-blank that it will base allocations on a given set of metrics, there’s really no ignoring that.  The people whose courses don’t fit the metrics as cleanly as others are capable of connecting the dots.  

Since status anxiety is likely to persist, any of my colleagues out there who are considering an ECHS-style program would be well-advised to take the temperature of the faculty, and to offer whatever assurances they can, before jumping in.  The program itself may well be worthy -- I’ve been impressed by the results I’ve seen -- but it may set off a serious trip wire.  Proceed with caution.  I’m not suggesting that it’s worth sacrificing a generation of kids just to avoid irritating some adults.  It isn’t.  But be aware that what seems in isolation like an obviously good idea may sound to some faculty like a mortal insult, and that they may respond accordingly.  Don’t be blindsided.

From Adjunct to Administration?

In response to yesterday’s post about a thin bench for leadership roles at community colleges, Lee Skallerup Bessette mentioned on Twitter that plenty of people with leadership potential and interest are stuck in the ranks of the adjuncts, because they haven’t been able to get that first foot in the door.  She suggested ACE fellowships for adjuncts, so they could get the experience to be taken seriously as administrative candidates.

I’ve been chewing on the idea ever since.

We’d have to clarify what “administrative role” means.  I don’t see someone without full-time higher ed experience moving directly into senior ranks, for example.  Too much would be new, and it would be entirely too easy to fall into some predictable traps.

But a midtier role?  I could see it.  In fact, I’ve hired that way -- the new dean of Business and STEM on my campus, whom I hired, came from the adjunct ranks.  That said, she did bring quite a bit of industry experience, which is helpful in that division.  And when she was in the adjunct ranks, she took it upon herself to establish a speakers’ series on campus, bringing successful local businesspeople to talk to students.  That made an impression.

Administrative and staff roles in other areas of the college, such as student affairs, also tend not to require experience as full-time faculty.  Some level of teaching experience can be helpful, though, particularly in areas like academic advising.  Knowing what faculty are dealing with can help in working with students who are trying to find their way in unfamiliar territory.

In some ways, the value of something like an ACE fellowship program for adjuncts might be in depolarizing some of the discourse.  To the extent that a college looks like a black box, it’s easy to hurl demands at it and draw conclusions when those demands aren’t met.  But if you see how the sausage is made, you learn quickly that it isn’t that easy.  That’s not to say that this is the best of all possible worlds, by any means; it’s in hopes that a serious confrontation with the issues at hand might lead to some better ideas.  That has been the subtext of this blog pretty much from the beginning, but local contexts differ in important ways.  

In any event, it’s becoming clear that colleges are going to have to become less rigid in their hiring patterns.  That can be difficult when you hire by committee.  Committees have their virtues, but they do tend to favor less risky choices.  I tend to believe that if the status quo is proving unsustainable, then the safe choice is, by definition, unsafe.  But that remains a minority view.  Getting entire committees to look at non-traditional candidates is harder than getting individuals to do it.  When committee dynamics are compounded by an acute awareness of litigiousness, the temptation to flee to safety is strong.  Folks coming in from the cold will have a heavy burden of proof, perhaps more so than they should.

Wise and worldly readers, do you see potential in some sort of embedded or shadowing program in which adjuncts could see the workings of administration up close?  Or is this just too far afield?